What confounds me about the fandroids is that Apple is somehow doomed as Android becomes more widespread. That's as ridiculous as saying, well, the iPhone 3G was doomed because you had BBerry, Symbian, WindowsMobile, etc, and whatever OS all the major non-smart phones ran on.

I am unaware of anybody predicting Apple's demise. Especially due to Android.

Its wireless business made up for the landline decline.
AT&T added 2.1 million new wireless subscribers in the quarter,
which is down from 2.7 million a year ago. The growth slowed due primarily to a matured
market as most now have at least
one cellphone with a service plan. It's remarkable that 90%
of new subscribers came to AT&T thanks to iPhone 3G and its service lock.

But really do you need anything more extraordinary than the elephant in the room?

Apple has become the most profitable handset manufacturer on the planet - after just three and a bit years. Does that not, in any way, suggest that something remarkable has happened here?

The previous business model enjoyed by Nokia has collapsed because at the profitable end of the market, customers suddenly demanded a better product, and were prepared to abandon their existing carriers to get it.

Nokia has had four years to formulate a response to this sea change in the industry. To this most disruptive of disruptive products. And their response is....

The previous business model enjoyed by Nokia has collapsed because at the profitable end of the market, customers suddenly demanded a better product, and were prepared to abandon their existing carriers to get it.

Nokia has had four years to formulate a response to this sea change in the industry. To this most disruptive of disruptive products. And their response is....

Did you read your link? It's about "green-type-sustainability" - not Nokia's ability to sustain itself during a dramatic market upheaval.

C.

Did you read my post?

"The annual review of the DJSI family is based on a
thorough analysis of corporate economic, environmental and social performance, assessing
issues such as corporate governance, risk management, branding, climate change mitigation,
supply chain standards and labor practices."

The first criteria is economic performance. Bankrupt companies, obviously, are not sustainable. Neither are shaky companies.

But Nokia has been awarded the top honors by Dow Jones as the company most likely to sustain itself.

SAM is an investment boutique focused exclusively on Sustainability Investing

Quote:

Based on global sustainability trends, SAM has identified Sustainability Themes such as Water, Energy, Resource Efficiency, Climate Change and Healthy Living. These investment themes are translated into thematic-oriented portfolios which often contain a high portion of small and midsized companies with attractive valuations. The focus lies on companies that develop and market innovative products and services accompanying the emergence of new sectors that are expected to experience above-average growth. As such, sustainability theme investing offers investors attractive return potential.

It's about investing for tree huggers.
Perhaps the reality that investors should look at is the fact that Nokia has lost a third of its value in the last 12 months.

It's obvious from the past month, Newtron has been getting his rocks off by purposefully going against whatever everyone else says, methodically, post-by-post. When his "points" are directly countered, he tries to shift it not-so-subtly to a kind of side angle.

It doesn't matter what you say, Newtron just can't resist trying to counter it.

This is getting tiresome.

Newtron, for example, what the hell has Nokia's "sustainability" (in anything) got to do with anything?

Newtron, for example, what the hell does Nokia's "sustainability"(in anything) got to do with anything?

.

The point was made that Nokia is going to hell in a handbasket.

I countered that far from that being the truth, Nokia has instead been deemed to be the most sustainable (in a broader sense of the word than some folks would like to admit) company in the entire tech sector by Dow Jones.

No - but it's profit margin is now at 2% and likely to become negative next year. That is a charlie-foxtrot by most people's reckoning.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Newtron

I countered that far from that being the truth, Nokia has instead been deemed to be the most sustainable (in a broader sense of the word than some folks would like to admit) company in the entire tech sector by Dow Jones.
Please try to keep up.

"The annual review of the DJSI family is based on a
thorough analysis of corporate economic, environmental and social performance, assessing
issues such as corporate governance, risk management, branding, climate change mitigation,
supply chain standards and labor practices."

"The annual review of the DJSI family is based on a
thorough analysis of corporate economic, environmental and social performance, assessing
issues such as corporate governance, risk management, branding, climate change mitigation,
supply chain standards and labor practices."

One can only hope that the exceptional quality-of-life indicators enjoyed by Nokia's plethora of middle-managers is a source of comfort for them in the period following the downsizing.

What confounds me about the fandroids is that Apple is somehow doomed as Android becomes more widespread. That's as ridiculous as saying, well, the iPhone 3G was doomed because you had BBerry, Symbian, WindowsMobile, etc, and whatever OS all the major non-smart phones ran on.

Or the mac is somehow doomed at 8% or whatever it is now. iOS is well established and not much will dethrone its mindshare in the near future.

Nokia's biggest problem IMHO is that Symbian^3 isn't all that an inspiring platform to develop for given Nokia's market share, it's inability to execute and because it's still in that crappy unstable phase that all OSs go through near the beginning. iOS, Android, etc all went through this but are largely past it. So it'll be a couple years by the time they get to the equivalent stable state as Android 2.x.

Symbian^4 is going to have a complete revamp of the touch UI and full Qt integration so I expect a large amount of breakage between Symbian^3 and 4.

So really, why bother targeting Symbian as an app dev until Nokia gets its act together. Which may be never at the rate they've been going the last few years.

I suspect that even WP7 will stabilize faster given that one of MS' core strengths is supporting developers.

So it'll be a couple years by the time they get to the equivalent stable state as Android 2.x.

Symbian^4 is going to have a complete revamp of the touch UI and full Qt integration so I expect a large amount of breakage between Symbian^3 and 4.

So really, why bother targeting Symbian as an app dev until Nokia gets its act together. Which may be never at the rate they've been going the last few years.

I suspect that even WP7 will stabilize faster given that one of MS' core strengths is supporting developers.

Hmm. Why would Adroid (a new OS) with 3.x coming up be more stable than a very mature Symbian, which has it's latest evolution (instead of a rewrite) coming up with stuff like GUI acceleration?

Between Symbian ^3 and Symbian ^4 there will be breakage unless you create your apps with Qt. Then your apps should be minimalöy affected by OS differences and compatible with Meego, OSX, Windows and apparently possibly even Android. WP7 on the other hand is a more disruptive change than either Symbian or Android so how would that be the most stable?

Hmm. Why would Adroid (a new OS) with 3.x coming up be more stable than a very mature Symbian, which has it's latest evolution (instead of a rewrite) coming up with stuff like GUI acceleration?

Between Symbian ^3 and Symbian ^4 there will be breakage unless you create your apps with Qt. Then your apps should be minimalöy affected by OS differences and compatible with Meego, OSX, Windows and apparently possibly even Android. WP7 on the other hand is a more disruptive change than either Symbian or Android so how would that be the most stable?

Regs, Jarkko

I don't think Nokia will pin its future to Symbian (except at the bottom end) Nokia have said - no more Symbian in the N-Series devices.

I can't for the life of me understand why they would continue to develop this problematic platform. Symbian was created by Psion as a small footprint OS - well suited to the handheld devices back in the mid-90s.

At exactly the same time Symbian was running on a Psion organiser, the technology that became the iPhone OS was happily being used to create the World-Wide-Web on the NeXT workstation.

There's no need to develop horribly compromised operating systems to work on handhelds. Even the slowest modern handsets are superior to the workstations of yesteryear.

Nokia's most impressive technology is based on Meego , and I think they should intensify their efforts to make it suitable for the widest possible set of applications.

I don't think Nokia will pin its future to Symbian (except at the bottom end) Nokia have said - no more Symbian in the N-Series devices.

Actually Nokia didn't say that, and as their head of Mobile Solutions said

Quote:

There has also been some confusion about Symbian and Nseries. The Nokia N8 will be our only Nseries device on Symbian^3. Of course, we never comment on future products, but a Symbian^4 Nseries device is a strong possibility. A very strong possibility

Nokia would never pre-announce a product and thereby harm sales of their existing product line.
They'd never pre-announce the N97.
They'd never leak details about the N900 seven months prior to launch.
Or go on an international sales drive to pre-announce the N8

Perhaps if Nokia stopped vigorously competing with itself it might be in a slightly better shape.

Hmm. Why would Adroid (a new OS) with 3.x coming up be more stable than a very mature Symbian, which has it's latest evolution (instead of a rewrite) coming up with stuff like GUI acceleration?

Symbian^3 is mostly S60v5 with some touch/UI extensions and a 1st cut at Qt integration. Somewhat half baked and only charitably equivalent to say Android 1.0. Symbian^4 is revamping the touch interface.

Quote:

Between Symbian ^3 and Symbian ^4 there will be breakage unless you create your apps with Qt. Then your apps should be minimalöy affected by OS differences and compatible with Meego, OSX, Windows and apparently possibly even Android. WP7 on the other hand is a more disruptive change than either Symbian or Android so how would that be the most stable?

Because MS dev tools don't suck and they know how to build robust APIs?

Qt Quick seems better than Android XML UI layout which isn't hard given that Relative Layout is like some unholy spawn of GridBagLayout and XML. But Qt Mobility (access to the phone features like dialing, contacts, camera, etc) is still a moving target despite the 1.0 moniker. If I recall correctly it's still part of the beta SDK. Coding against the mobile extensions preview is like coding against pre-release Android. Useful to learn but expect a lot of breakage when S^4 comes out when it becomes mandatory.

At this point in time, I would think that the only devs really hammering away at S^3 development are existing Symbian devs and folks who really really want to code Qt on phones. Which isn't all THAT many.

That Qt is somewhat cross platform is mostly uninteresting. You can claim the same of Java and .NET but it doesn't matter that much unless you have an application you want to port from the desktop to a mobile platform.

WP7 SDKs are based on the solid foundations of other MS technologies like XNA and WPF just like iOS SDKs are based on solid foundations of other Apple technologies like the Core libraries.

I don't think Nokia will pin its future to Symbian (except at the bottom end) Nokia have said - no more Symbian in the N-Series devices.

Neither do I in the high end phone sector. They'll go Meego. In the low and mid-level they propably will stick to Symbian. The only things that Symbian lags behind Android is the UI and Dev environment. On others it's way ahead (power management, GPU acceleration, multitasking etc). UI is being revamped in ^4 and Dev environment is changing right now to Qt.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Carniphage

I am still not convinced that QT is good enough to best Cocoa.

That's just it. The commentary on Qt is extremely favourable. The transfer of Angry Birds for example from Cocoa to Qt (Beta at that stage) took three weeks. Can't be all that bad. And the Maemo version of Angry Birds is said to be better than iPhones (mainly due to resolution though).

I've said it before. There are a lot of very favourable comments on current Qt. App developers will come once the largest number of phones out there support Qt (remember Nokia's market share). Even if Nokia's market share dips dramatically, Qt-capable device deployment will be huge.

Add the Meego, Symbian, Android cross-platform to it (no need for desktop to complicate the discussion), there will be developers.

The thing really missing is a non-biased developer, who has written for both Qt and Cocoa to give their honest opinion. The would clear some stuff for me. I'm no developer so I can't really judge. I just want to understand the landscape better.

The point of this debate is to illustrate what monumentally incompetent decisions led to the demise of Nokia.
The utterly laughable statement you quoted, about never taling about future products, was the clearest possible illustration of just how bizarrely full of bullshit the Nokia management are. The record shows a long history of Nokia sabotaging existing product sales by pre announcing forthcoming products.

On your point.

I don't think we will ever see a Symbian 4 N-Series phone because the pursuit of two competing OS technologies is one of the reasons that Nokias product development has been so slow compared to others.

If we ever see such a thing, I'll happily admit I was wrong. Perhaps we will know in 3 or 4 years. But personally I don't think Nokia are that dumb.

What that are is embarrassed to admit that Symbian is a about to be relegated to the second tier.

That's just it. The commentary on Qt is extremely favourable. The transfer of Angry Birds for example from Cocoa to Qt (Beta at that stage) took three weeks. Can't be all that bad. And the Maemo version of Angry Birds is said to be better than iPhones (mainly due to resolution though).

At most, a product like Angry Birds should be 3 man months to develop from scratch. 1-2 weeks porting time to another platform would be reasonable. Three seems a bit long. I don't think that number suggests that QT is anything special.

I'd argue that a non-game product might be a better one to study.

Quote:

Originally Posted by jahonen

I've said it before. There are a lot of very favourable comments on current Qt. App developers will come once the largest number of phones out there support Qt (remember Nokia's market share). Even if Nokia's market share dips dramatically, Qt-capable device deployment will be huge.

Certainly solving the mess of incompatibility and fragmentation is a smart move for Nokia. But remember that a cross-plaform API does not magically solve that. To create great apps, a developer has to invest effort in each form-factor. A resistive screen qwertyphone needs different handling to a large screen capacitive display. Nokia's fragmented OSes are a problem that could be solved by QT. Nokia's huge number of SKUs and form-factors can not.

Cocoa isn't like this. Instead it provides robust flexible models for creating typical applications. It provides solutions for presenting information, manipulating data, saving and loading. It's all there and it's really very simple to exploit.

This leaves the programmer to focus entirely on customisation and experience. QT seems so solve a different problem.

Quote:

Originally Posted by jahonen

The thing really missing is a non-biased developer, who has written for both Qt and Cocoa to give their honest opinion.

(GRIN) That seems unlikely. There seems to be a near-religious schism between the two. I recently went to a mobile developer conference. The commercial message was quite clear. Right now the most profitable platform to develop for was iOS. I talked to a bunch of Symbian developers and asked them if they were going to switch platform. It seems they would rather chew razor-blades than learn Cocoa.

I have just taken up full-time iOS development. I'd happily learn QT if it appeared commercially viable. But at the moment the numbers don't work out. In terms of developer revenues the iPhone seems to be five or six times ahead of Android, and the Nokia platform is well behind that.

I'd respectfully suggest that if Nokia..
Completes Meego so that it is complete and awesomely great.
Get QT working effectively
Culls 70% of it's product lines
Successfully integrates a GPU into all devices (and into the OS)
Overhauls its development tools..

Then it might finally have a platform that is the technical peer of Android, WebOS, WP7 and iOS.
But that's a lot of ifs. It would still have a commercial mountain to climb.

The point of this debate is to illustrate what monumentally incompetent decisions led to the demise of Nokia.

No, the point of this debate is you are making false claims, and are trying to back track out of them.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Carniphage

The utterly laughable statement you quoted, about never taling about future products, was the clearest possible illustration of just how bizarrely full of bullshit the Nokia management are. The record shows a long history of Nokia sabotaging existing product sales by pre announcing forthcoming products.

Let's see, you made a claim regarding Nokia not making any more Symbian based N series devices. Where is your proof of this claim? I posted something that proves you claim was wrong, but your hatred means you will ignore this. Says alot about you.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Carniphage

I don't think we will ever see a Symbian 4 N-Series phone because the pursuit of two competing OS technologies is one of the reasons that Nokias product development has been so slow compared to others.

That is your thought, you are welcome to have your own thoughts.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Carniphage

If we ever see such a thing, I'll happily admit I was wrong. Perhaps we will know in 3 or 4 years. But personally I don't think Nokia are that dumb.

No you won't, you have been proved wrong in the past, you will just ignore the fact.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Carniphage

What that are is embarrassed to admit that Symbian is a about to be relegated to the second tier.

you will have to repeat this one, as I don't know what "what that are is" means. If you mean that I am embarrassed about Symbian.... Then no, I wouldn't embarrassed one bit, that would like saying my Macs are second teir as they account for under 5% of the worlds computers

You made a claim, a claim that was false, now you are trying to walk your way out of it.
.

Which claim did I make which is false. Please explain?

I honestly don't hate Nokia. I hate the fact that a once-brilliant world-beating European company has been flushed down the toilet by the most idiotic and incompetent leadership I have ever seen.

Here's my argument - in short "facty" sentences so that you can understand it without getting all confused again.

1) iPhone was released a little over three years ago by a company with zero experience of handset manufacture or design.
2) Nokia, world leader in handsets, dismissed it and failed to respond in any way.
3) iPhone triggered a sea change in the way consumers behaved, triggering subscribers to switch networks in order to get the device.
4) The willingness for consumers to drop their carriers, was a blow to Nokia, because their real strength was in forging commercial ties with carriers (not with consumers)
5) Google and Palm recognised this change in consumer habits and quickly responded with products.
6) Nokia did nothing, apart from repeatedly undermining current products, with pre-announcements of "better ones"
7) Sales of Nokia's N-series devices collapsed. Leaving a smartphone portfolio with lower price points and weaker profitability.
8) After just two years, Apple became the worlds most profitable handset maker. Passing Nokia.
9) After three years Apple captures some 45 of the entire profits in the entire cellphone industry.
10) Nokia are widely criticised for their failure to respond to this change in the market. Specifically in their failure to create compelling products that rival Android and iPhone devices.
11) They hire a manager. (not a product guy)

I thank you for this opportunity to clarify this argument.

C.

Hint . if you sound out the words - you might do better at understanding their meaning.

you will have to repeat this one, as I don't know what "what that are is" means.

Apologies. Mis-typed without my glasses.

Should have said.

"What they are"

Having two competing OS technologies is two more than most cellphone companies. And one more than the others. Nokia are clearly going to have to dump one of them. They can't do this without upsetting some people.

This is why they issue veiled and mysterious comments about the future of Symbian.